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Wi-Fi Plus Cellular?

sflomenb

sflomenb

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 22, 2011
915
132
I saw it in photos of Settings in the newest beta on this forum. What exactly is its purpose?
 
If your Wifi is unusually slow and not suitable to whatever you're doing, it'll switch to cellular.
 
It happens to me all the time when I get in my car at my house. The Wifi signal is strong enough for the phone to keep attached, but not strong enough to actually transfer data. I have to manually switch off the Wifi to get any internet access. This should prevent that and allow data to failover to cell.
 
Appears that your question has been answered, but I'll just add another scenario where this will be nice. Often times in the waiting rooms at hospitals and dr. offices there will be a strong WiFi signal, but no internet service on it and to use my device I have to manually disable WiFi to force 3G. I don't have the beta installed, but it looks like this feature will automatically the switching.
 
lpeedin said:
Appears that your question has been answered, but I'll just add another scenario where this will be nice. Often times in the waiting rooms at hospitals and dr. offices there will be a strong WiFi signal, but no internet service on it and to use my device I have to manually disable WiFi to force 3G. I don't have the beta installed, but it looks like this feature will automatically the switching.
Click to expand...

I've seen this in airports too. Basically the wifi is "open" in that it doesn't require a password to join the SSID but the use of the wifi requires registration to actually get to the internet. It's maddening. This is a very welcome "enhancement."
 
lpeedin said:
Appears that your question has been answered, but I'll just add another scenario where this will be nice. Often times in the waiting rooms at hospitals and doctor's offices there will be a strong WiFi signal, but no internet service on it and to use my device I have to manually disable WiFi to force 3G. I don't have the beta installed, but it looks like this feature will automatically do the switching.
Click to expand...
Let's hope that it takes care of that. I also have 2 scenarios where this would come in handy.

First, at my work we have this guest WiFi network. There is a security policy on it that requires you to open a web browser and re-acknowledge the disclaimer after you've been idle for some time. The funny thing is that when this is being "forced" on you, your iDevice remains connected to WiFi and still has a valid IP; however, whatever apps are trying to connect to the Internet are SOL until you open up Safari, try to browse somewhere and re-acknowledge the disclaimer. If this feature works as desired and can automatically determine that despite the fact that WiFi has valid IP, it is useless and switch over to cell data, that would be huge.

Second, my cable company has WiFi hot spots throughout the area. In some cases they work, in others they don't despite the fact that the iDevice appears to be connected. Again, if this can determine that WiFi is useless and go to cell instead, it would be nice.
 
That's where I'm looking.

r6jN5.png
 
^ you should be able to scroll that window down. When I first brought my screen up it looked exactly like the one you posted... Wifi+Cell is next along with choices for using cellular for iCloud, iTunes, etc...
 
I am not running ios6 on my iPhone, but it looks like this on my iPad.
 

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I am really looking forward to this. I can't remember how many times I have had a poor wifi connection and had to switch it off to get connected.
 
Can anyone confirm that a slow wifi will trigger the switch or just a dead wifi (ie, connected but no Internet at all)?
 
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